Hey Ted Cruz, What Would Jesus Say About Your Deceitful Mailers?

You know what’s a lot of fun? Being an atheist with a pretty good understanding of the Bible and Christianity when you write about the hypocrisy of politicians.

Here’s a quote from The Ten Commandments.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness.” — Susan “God” McGee

Everyone of course remembers the Big Ones in the Ten Commandments, right? Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not buy ice cream past the expiration date. You know, the big ones. And for the most part, evangelical Christian conservatives like Ted Cruz manage to adhere to those big ones. The “stealing” one may be up for debate, but that’s usually a matter of rhetoric more than anything. But the one commandment that Cruz most certainly does not follow? That shalt not lie, or bare false witness.

For example, Cruz’s campaign telling voters in Iowa if they support Ben Carson last week they might as well switch and vote for him because Carson was suspending his campaign. That was a lie, and Cruz was even called out for it on national TV. He apologized to Carson, of course, but if you think that is the first and last time Cruz’s mendacity has been on display in this primary season, I have a really neat bridge to sell you.

In a report published on The Huffington Post, for example, we find out that Team Cruz has been mailing really terribly misleading mailers out to potential voters. Envelopes stamped with the words “Check Enclosed” have made their way to voters according to the HuffPo piece, but once opened, the contents of the envelopes are revealed to be quite different. The checks are fake, and there are letters inside actually asking the recipients to send money to Cruz.

image courtesy of The Huffington Post

Let’s go back over this in case it’s not clear. Ted Cruz is sending solicitation letters that imply he’s giving money to people and instead he’s sending them fake checks and asking them for money. It’s not only lies, it’s slimy and fraudulent feeling, isn’t it? I mean, if just some random asshole sent you a letter like this, you’d think he was a conman, right? I would.

Cruz’s misleading mailers don’t exactly rise to the level of mass murder, of course. But it does speak volumes about someone who stands on a stack of Bibles to decry things like marriage equality and abortion because they offend his religion that turns around violates one of the simplest of the tenets that his religion was founded on. This kind of hypocrisy is certainly not anything new for politicians, and most definitely not for ones who claim to be Christian.

The hypocrisy still needs to be called out though, every time. Because if these guys are going to sermonize to us and try to drag us into some kind of theocratic state, every single gap in their Christian rhetoric needs to be exposed. Cruz likes to pretend he walks the walk, but clearly he doesn’t. If he did, lies wouldn’t be what he sent around the country in little envelopes. He’s a deceitful charlatan of a man, and hopefully if more and more of his hypocrisy is exposed, it will cost him among the Christians who actually do believe in that particular commandment’s worth.

I’m not a religious person, so do I really care about his Christian hypocrisy? Only in so much as it proves that Cruz is very fake, very falsely sanctimonious, and very much so deserving of all the scorn and derision those traits elicit.